Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

Xerolooper writes "What would the world be like if everyone could enjoy the same patent system we use in the USA? From the article: 'A senior lawyer at Microsoft is calling for the creation of a global patent system to make it easier and faster for corporations to enforce their intellectual property rights around the world.' They have already attracted opposition from the open-source community and the Pirate Party. According to the article, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) will be meeting in Geneva on the 17th and 18th of September."

Not to worry. Even if MS whipped out their absolute best fat-wallet, arm-twisting, favor-calling lobbyists and somehow got this concept generally accepted inside America, there are plenty enough people outside the US who are wise to the ways of The Vole who would keep this from being able to happen on a worldwide basis.

I think you miss MS's position. Being dragged into court doesn't bother them, it is part of their cost of business. What bothers them is not being able to intimidate or drag others to court. FOSS is a wild card that MS's business plan cannot contain...unless there is a global patent regime where they can enforce their will upon non-corporate entities outside the U.S. Corporate entitles can be bought, intimidated, stabbed in the back, dragged though lengthy legal proceedings, forced to accept dumb formats, e

Actually, no. I really believe that patents are justified, but they are being terribly abused. Likewise with copyright. With either one, if I come up with a truly original idea, I feel that I should be permitted to make money from it, for a period of time. No competition, it's all mine. For a LIMITED period of time, of course. Certainly no longer than a decade. 5 years, 7 years, 10 years max.

And, I really believe that if patents and copyrights were regulated in such a way, people would accept them.

There are actually some admirable parts of the US patent system. For example, disclosure. You can disclose your product in the US up to a year before you file your patent. In Europe, there's no grace period. What the lack of a grace period means in practice is that startups that don't know any better get bitten while established companies don't. A grace period also lets startups try to raise money to fund development of their product before you have to fork out $10k to get it patented. In general, that aspect of the US system is small business friendly.

In terms of software, while it used to be really bad, I think US patent law is moving in the right direction -- it looks like ultimately they'll allow software patents, but they're going to have to be a *lot* less general and a *lot* more in depth. Which is a good thing. I think all patents should have a shorter term, especially software patents (these days, if you can't turn a profit in 5-10 years, you're not going to -- and the public domain is more important than ever). But that's no reason to throw out the system altogether.

I've taken a much softer stance toward our patent system after I got involved with it in the process of starting a business. Now our trademark system... ugh, don't get me started. I may not be able to trademark my business's name because there's a company that sells Asian videos and eyeglasses under the same name, and they got shoved into the computer catch-all category '9' with me simply because their videos are downloadable online. Everything even tangentially related to computers gets shoved into category 9, but beanwhile, there are separate classes for, for example, "precious metals" versus "common metals" (and all sorts of things like that).

Odd, I regard the grace period, and the first-to-invent system of which it is a side-effect, as some of the worst features of the US patent system. The entire point of patents is to encourage disclosure. If you have already disclosed, then society gains nothing by granting you a monopoly on your invention. This system in the USA means that your best bet is often to keep your invention secret, wait for someone else to invent it independently, and only then file the patent. You can even wait until they file the patent (see TI Vs Intel) and then produce notebooks showing that you thought of it first. If you do this in most of the world, it just invalidates their patent application. If you do it in the USA, you get the patent.

I filed a huge patent in 2000 that the patent office felt was six different inventions, not just one. It was a lot cheaper for me to file it all at once, which is why I did it that way. By US patent law, each individual part can be filed one at a time, after the previous one has been reviewed and dealt with by the patent office. I still have two parts pending review.

No, I think that math that is actually expressed in an instruction set and explicitly requires the processors, memory and circuits that you admit are patentable is also patentable.

You just said no, then essentially repeated what I said in agreement... odd, you just said that you think maths that is expressed in an instruction set is patentable. The only addition being it MUST be tied to the hardware, You don't seem to get that the instruction set is moot, it's merely a language to express the maths in. Also randomly, I can read x86 hex code(slowly).. does that make me a computer and patentable? (/sarcasm)

so, you really don't see the difference between hardware and software running o

"if I come up with a truly original idea, I feel that I should be permitted to make money from it,"

What if you came up with that idea whilst trying to solve a problem, only to find that someone solving the same problem came up with the same idea, patented it, but then didn't personally phone you to point out that solving that problem is now illegal, and just sues you for doing the world a favour?

Actually, it doesn't. There is an European Patent Office, but whether those patents are recognized varies from country to country. There are some politicians in the EU that are pushing for so-called "community patents", which would be EU-wide patents, but those does not exist so far.

Wouldn't it make more sense to have patents expire after the research costs have been recovered?

What if I put money into researching 100 different ideas, but only one of them is a "winner"? If I can recover my research costs for all of them, probably we've got "Hollywood accounting" problems. If I can only recover my research costs for the one, probably it's not worth my money to invest in research.

I think the problem with the patent system in general is that it ends up having to try to straddle similar lines (and fails). It's ultimately good for everyone if research and innovation are financially encouraged, but a flawed patent system can also stifle innovation.

"If I had to answer the following question, 'What is slavery?' and if I should respond in one word, 'It is murder', my meaning would be understood at once. I should not need a long explanation to show that the power to deprive a man of his thought, his will, and his personality is the power of life and death. So why to this other question, 'What is property?' should I not answer in the same way, 'It is theft,' without fearing to be misunderstood, since the second proposition is only a transformation of the first?" - Pierre-Joseph Proudhon [wikipedia.org], "Qu'est-ce que la propriété?" 1840 (Translation: "What is Property?", Cambridge University Press 1993, page 13)

So we need another transformation now: "What is intellectual property? It is thought control."

They were developed by companies that definitely wouldn't have done it if it weren't for the IP rewards.

And your proof for this is . ..? Actually you can have no proof because we have always lived under an increasingly suffocating patent/copyright/trade-mark blanket. Big Pharma is the most profitable [kff.org] industry in the world, surely some restriction on their ability to print money wouldn't harm innovation in the field, in fact maybe the exact opposite [businessweek.com] is true!

At the cost of $200 million it was most likely developed by NIH grants to universities that Big Phrama attached to after there was some promise. The big secret of the pharmaceutical industry is that almost no money is spent on R&D it's all spent to make the treatments about to come out of patent protection just slightly better so they re-patent the and then spend a truck load of money on marketing to burry the old drug in the mind of the companies and the doctors.

If they spent about 1% of their current marketing budget on R&D the array of drugs would be so, so much better.

The question is how much of that R&D is on real R&D and how much is on is spent on Viagra II, now lasting 4.5 hours instead of 4. Most it of it would be in the later category. They simply never break down those categories. (Also how much is in non-medicial R&D spending, packaging, etc). Also, how much of the spending is finding other uses for drugs that already exist? None of this is answered by a 10-K filing.

No major work ever comes out of Big Pharma R&D. All the important work is publicly funded.

The same report also indicates that they spend almost 3.3 billion dollars in just marketing in the same period.

Those opposing patents and IP in general often claim that inventions would still be generated in the absence of IP protection, and that might be true for some inventions, while most require hughe amounts of R&D that simply wouldn't happen if the money wasn't there.

I think you might be hitting a 'reverse accident' fallacy here. Just because some inventions occured in the presence of IP protection does not imply that, in the absense of IP protection, nothing would ever be invented. Plenty of fields and markets thrive without IP entering into them.

There are conceivable models other than our own. Don't let the haters convince you otherwise.

Actually, most of the really innovative periods in time came when people disrespected IP laws and stole everything they could. The U.S. stole all kinds of ideas during the industrial revolution, and that worked out rather swell for everyone involved.

Well, that's not really up to you, though. What is and is not property, and who owns or legitimately possesses that property, and what rights such a person or other people have with respect to the property can only be determined one of two ways. The first involves you personally defending it from others by means of force; this only works to a limited extent. The second is consensus opinion. That is, you have to convince everyone else to hon

How about the companies give us something first - like a push for a global taxation system, so that companies cannot just set up shell offices in tax havens, or threaten to leave a country/state because some other country/state has cheaper taxes?

But that'd be unfair of course. To the companies I mean.

Obviously one system doesn't fit all - unless it's something that benefits the companies.

Or, how about drop corporate income tax and just tax the real payers directly. Why do corporate incomes have to be double taxed? Tax the corporation, then tax the individual who actually takes home the income.

And here I thought that the whole idea of "no taxation without representation" would mean something. Corporations are being taxed, but do not get to vote. In many countries, that may make sense. But in the country whose existence was catapulted by the Boston Tea Party [wikipedia.org](*), there does seem something untoward going on.

(*) Yes, I know that wasn't "the" deciding factor, nor the final act. But, as wikipedia says, it was a key event, and the reasons for it seem apropos for mentioning in this context.

There are plenty of people who're taxed but not able to vote. Non-citizen permanent residents, those under 18, convicted felons, etc., all must still pay taxes. Do you propose exempting them all from taxes as well?

And furthermore, corporations do get representation through their right to hire lobbyists and establish political action committees. Let's not kid ourselves. In any reasonable interpretation of the notion, any major corporation gets far more "representation" than the average natural person, despite being barred from voting.

Who cares about huge profits. You worry about you. The profits are what is required to incentivize those that will work the 14 hour days, to do so. The shareholders elect who they think best fits the roll. If they think the CEO is being overpaid they can sell their shares. Or vote no on the retention bonus.

What is boils down to is grumbling jealous slashdotters that want a piece of the action without a piece of the labor. Again-- you worry about you. Taxing the corporations does nothing but make it more expensive to operate. If their profits are lower, they cannot consider hiring more people to expand their operations.

Tax the people getting the paychecks. Quit trying to flipping take over every single piece of society that hasn't been completely mauled by the government's hands yet.

You'd never get a "fair" system where the biggest banks/corporations/trusts aren't exempt. This would simply streamline the process for these corporations to get around tax laws. Not only that, but any tax is going to be passed onto the consumer.

What we should really have is to get rid of the need for so much tax money to conduct the business of government.

People need to stop falling for politicians who bribe them with their own money.

What we should really have is to get rid of the need for so much tax money to conduct the business of government.

People need to stop falling for politicians who bribe them with their own money.

Oh, if only that would happen! That is exactly spot-on.

But as long as we allow the government to seize so much wealth, politicians will continue to use this method to increase the governments' power, and citizens will fall for it if for no other reason than in desperation to try to get enough of their wealth back from

Companies pay people to invent things. Patents are not meant to provide riches & fame to holy Inventors, they are meant to increase innovation. Please explain how companies will be able to hire R&D departments in your scenario, where the employees will just individually patent and keep all the work they were hired to do.

I'd actually go a step further, and say that patents cannot be bought not sold, period, not at all, no exceptions.

That is really, really stupid. Should we also abolish all forms of money and go back to a barter system?

That would, hopefully, put the kibosh on most of the patent trolls. Y'know, people who don't do any work, but like to profit off of other people's work.

No, people like Matt Katzer [sourceforge.net] seem able to cause trouble just fine without being

Company patents are developed on their time and resources. They are often built off of dozens of peoples' efforts. This is one of the benefits of companies - they allow people to collaborate and then share profits (either through part ownership or salaries).

I'd love to see the economics research behind that number. Must have been a lot of work determining the optimal patent term. I suspect it'll be no trouble getting published. Or, as is more likely, was that arbitrary number pulled out of the air?

As for 'no extensions. no exceptions,' what about delays brought about by the patent office? Surely you wouldn't penalize the inventor for bureaucratic incompetence?

No patenting of algorithms

Algorithms are already unpatentable. An algorithm, alone, is not useful, and so it fails the requirement of utility. What is patentable is, according to the Federal Circuit, the use of an algorithm tied to a particular machine to accomplish a useful result. I suspect the Supreme Court will probably overrule the Federal Circuit and allow the patenting of the practical application of algorithms.

I can think about PageRank [wikipedia.org] all day long and accomplish nothing. But if I apply PageRank to pages on the internet and use it to optimize searches, then it becomes a patentable invention [google.com].

Patents to be awarded to individuals only, not companies

This is already the case in the US. Patents can be assigned to companies, but only individuals can apply for and receive them.

I suppose you meant that companies should be prevented from owning patents at all, but that would be pointless. Employees would simply be required to license the invention to the company exclusively. It would only add transaction costs.

I'd love to see the economics research behind that number. Must have been a lot of work determining the optimal patent term. I suspect it'll be no trouble getting published. Or, as is more likely, was that arbitrary number pulled out of the air?

Just as arbitrary as the current numbers, you troll.

As for 'no extensions. no exceptions,' what about delays brought about by the patent office? Surely you wouldn't penalize the inventor for bureaucratic incompetence?

So in your model bureaucratic incompetence is inevitable. Fantastic.

This is already the case in the US. Patents can be assigned to companies, but only individuals can apply for and receive them....and plenty of employment contracts stipulate that you MUST assign them. Effectively the company owns the patent, which should never be the case.

Algorithms are already unpatentable. An algorithm, alone, is not useful, and so it fails the requirement of utility. What is patentable is, according to the Federal Circuit, the use of an algorithm tied to a particular machine to accomplish a useful result. I suspect the Supreme Court will probably overrule the Federal Circuit and allow the patenting of the practical application of algorithms.

Are you done defending a system that gave us patents on such brilliant algorithms as "one click"?

I suppose you meant that companies should be prevented from owning patents at all, but that would be pointless. Employees would simply be required to license the invention to the company exclusively. It would only add transaction costs.

And say hello to the far greater number of inventions so far unrealized because of the legal expense and danger.

[citation needed]

Actually, no, that would be unfair. Of course you can't cite an actual citation for your hypothetical 'what if' handwaving. Gosh, if only patents didn't exist, we'd all be multi-billionaires with flying cars and robotic servants. For proof, just consider the fact that patents do exist, and we aren't.

The main point of a patent is to give the inventor a chance to recover the development costs and make a profit from their hard work before anybody else is allowed to copy them. If you think that this can be done in such a short time, you have a very simplistic idea of the costs of research and development. Before coming up with any more unrealistic suggestions, I'd advise you to learn a little bit about how the Real World(TM) works.

With the recent Bilski ruling, it seems like the term on software patents has been reduce to 0 years.My money is on that ruling being the motivator for MS to make this call for "global harmonization" - as they are one of the largest holders of software patents they are looking for a way to get Bilski invalidated through the backdoor.

Silence! Guards! Have this man cut in half! Send one half to the slug breeding caves and the other to the sun! Patent suffrage isn't extended to the likes of half burned up corpses bloated with slug eggs! Wahaha! Wahahaha!

Wait what? We don't have a worldwide empire yet? Well what can we do to him? Nothing? Well fine.

To answer your question, when the glorious day comes. No, you won't get a vote. Now get out of here!

Is this because the Canadian firm (i4i) hit it big on an American company (Microsoft) with their patent trolling?

Do they think this is going to make it better? Now its going to be a MASSIVE convoluted state of patents EVERYWHERE and everyone will be stepping on someones toes. The idea of a Patent Law being forced across the ENTIRE PLANET is ridiculous.

We haven't even reached World Peace, how do you expect to enforce Patent Laws in warzones, 3rd world countries, embassies?

Again, and again, this crap comes up. It never was true in the first place and yet you pro-MS people keep spouting it. The reason they didn't go after OpenOffice is that OpenOffice doesn't infringe on their patent. The reason they "waited" is that they were actually working with Microsoft on getting their technology into Office. They sued when Microsoft dropped them like a bad habit and took the technology for themselves.

A unified patent system would actually benefit individual inventors, small businesses, and startups more than established players with deep pockets. Right now if one wants to file for patent protection in every country with a patent system worth the name it costs ~$200,000 in filing fees alone, to say nothing of attorney and translation costs. The lifetime maintenance fees of that single patent will be well into the millions. Even only filing in the 'big three' of the US, Europe, and Japan typically costs well over $100,000 in government fees and attorney fees.

For a big company like Microsoft, that's just the cost of doing business. But that $200,000 is a huge amount of money to a startup, to say nothing of an individual garage inventor. Globalization and the internet mean that an inventor can sell an invention to people all around the world for far less than it would have cost 20 or 30 years ago. Protecting that invention all around the world, however, is often prohibitively expensive for all but the most well-funded, established companies.

It's true that companies like Microsoft would also benefit from lower filing costs, but small companies and individual inventors will benefit much more. It will also mean less money wasted on lawyers, as a single attorney in a single country can handle the whole process instead of having to use attorneys all over the world. And of course it will mean less duplication of effort in government as patent offices share resources. Right now there is an enormous duplication of effort as each application in each country is met with the same prior art, which is overcome with the same arguments. This is a tremendous waste of both government and applicant resources.

I generally agree with what you are saying, but you are missing two little tiny things:1) You don't need a patent to sell a product.2) If you are already making and selling a product, no one can jump in and buy a patent for it and try to sue you (well, they can try). You should have prior art and proper documentation of when you invented and started selling said product just in case. The patent will get canned and lawsuit will rule in your favour.

That's true, but for a lot of kinds of products it helps a great deal or is a practical necessity. This is true of anything that is easily reverse engineered and especially true of anything that is substantially cheaper to make than to develop. Pharmaceuticals are the classic example, but it's also true of commonplace inventions like coffee cup sleeves [google.com], for example.

If you are already making and selling a product, no one can jump in and buy a patent for it and try

A handful of patents are not worth much against the thousands of patents the small [inventor] may be potentially violating.

Which is why Microsoft, with its thousands of patents, so easily struck down Google when all it had was a couple of patents on search technology, effectively cutting Google off at the knees and leaving Microsoft free to dominate the search engine market.

Oh wait, no, that's not what happened at all. In fact, as we've just seen with the i4i case, a single patent owned by a small company

Yes, what we need is an international patent cooperation treaty.You could file an application with an international searching authority, have an optional preliminary examination of your claims there too, and then enjoy streamlined examination in various countries around the world based on the international examination authority's findings.

I wholeheartedly support a correctly implemented patent system in industrialized nations. Although not all inventions fall into this particular category (and we can go on and on all day about those that don't), a number of very valuable inventions require massive investments of time and money to develop and perfect. Without any assurance of the ability to recover for these investments, people would be hard-pressed to engage in them in the first place. Think, most obviously, pharmaceuticals.

A uniform patent system would require poorer countries to adhere to patent norms that would be inherently contrary to their own interests. If you have nothing to protect, and it is absolutely to your advantage to take, why should you be forced to follow along? It makes no sense to ask developing nations and others with no need for a patent system to obey the restrictions earned elsewhere. And, here's the important thing, these two completely different levels of protection can in fact peacefully co-exist. The market will correct. If a poorer country absolutely needs a particular drug developed which no other country needs, maybe then they would find use in patent or patent-like protections. Until then, it's silly to impose our will on others.

I expect every nation that thinks it is going to host the HQ of any such organisation will be all for it. But not so much when they realise the entire patents system would be controlled by foreign nations. At an individual level, I don't give a shit what is patented in the US. Unless I do something over there, you don't have ANY claim to authority over me. But if my country has chosen to patent that specific thing then OK, I'll respect that, I use my authority as a citizen to grant them that authority over me (by that same token, I quite rightly do not have any say over what is patented in the US).

A patent is an agreement between an "inventor" (sadly, needing to use the term very loosely) and society. The inventor offers details of the invention in return to society granting the inventor specific rights for a specified period of time. Therefore it follows that the society upholding the rights be the one agreeing to it, as closely as practicable.

I see plenty arguments here that favour the inventor, but nothing to restore balance by favouring society - unless you accept "enrich public knowledge" (knowledge that they cannot do much with) or "encourage competition" (competition in submitting patents that is).

Furthermore the national system works quite well in limiting excessive scope. Presently it is only worth an inventor obtaining a patent in a country he has some intention to trade in. With a global system, he would obtain a patent whether he intends to trade there or not.

The problem is that if a global patent system were devised that were more sane than the US system, the US would say "screw you; we won't tolerate this violation of our sovereignty" and continue with it's own broken patent system.

So a global patent system is guaranteed to be no better than the US system, and likely to be worse.

Neither patents nor copyrights nor indeed any other laws would not exist or have any weight without the military might of nations to back them up. For those of you out there who maintain the pleasant fiction of "international law" just remember that at any time a sovereign nation can always appeal to the court of last resort, or as Cicero put it: silent enim leges inter arma [wikipedia.org]. International law is a useful fiction that nations maintain as long as it suits common interests. However, it has no force without the sword, and the willingness to use the sword, to back it up.

Just another example of a huge corporate entity using their power and influence to try and do end-runs around governments, thereby subverting the will of the people in democratically elected nations.

That is much of what international trade law is designed to do: remove barriers that prevent industry from having to respect the will of the populace they are either a) exploiting via cheap labor and substandard environmental practice, or b) selling overpriced nonessential garbage made at the expense of people thousands of miles away to.

New world order, same as the old world order. Power is king, and they know what's best for you. Now shut up and be happy.

I think it is rather bigheaded of people to think that the world would automatically opt for an American model - other countries have a view on these matters too, you know. We can be very sure that China will weigh in heavily on this matter.

O, I know! I'll patent the dot. I will get rich sleeping with all people of the world buying licenses from me!

You, sir, are a five-digit slashdot user. There ARE no people sleeping with you, much less people sleeping with you who are buying licenses to use a period. (That's because I have patented the period, which I license to people for less than what you charge for "the dot". And I license it to half the population for a very small amount. If you are one of the people who hasn't paid your period licens